Top 100 Ray Kurzweil Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything.”

— Ray Kurzweil

52. “Intuition is linear; our imaginations are weak. Even the brightest of us only extrapolate from what we know now; for the most part, we’re afraid to really stretch.”

— Ray Kurzweil

53. “The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.”

— Ray Kurzweil

54. “Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.”

— Ray Kurzweil

55. “Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.”

— Ray Kurzweil

56. “By 2010 computers will disappear. They’ll be so small, they’ll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We’ll be interacting with virtual personalities.”

— Ray Kurzweil

57. “As you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud. The biological portion of our brain didn’t go away but the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically the way we back up everything now that’s digital.”

— Ray Kurzweil

58. “Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines – or one million machines – can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.”

— Ray Kurzweil

59. “Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection.”

— Ray Kurzweil

60. “Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.”

— Ray Kurzweil

61. “My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google.”

— Ray Kurzweil

62. “By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses.”

— Ray Kurzweil

63. “The lesson of these new insights is that our brain is entirely like any of our physical muscles: Use it or lose it.”

— Ray Kurzweil

64. “The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large.”

— Ray Kurzweil

65. “The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;.”

— Ray Kurzweil

66. “Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small.”

— Ray Kurzweil

67. “Phosphatidylserine is a natural constituent of the cell membrane but is found in especially high concentrations in the brain. Supplementing with phosphatidylserine slows down memory loss and has been shown to reverse memory loss in some patients with age-related memory decline. It also lowers levels of cortisol, a principal hormone of aging.”

— Ray Kurzweil

68. “Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag. – Diane Ackerman.”

— Ray Kurzweil

69. “But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it’s stuck. – MARVIN MINSKY.”

— Ray Kurzweil

70. “There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”

— Ray Kurzweil

71. “Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we have used our tools to extend our reach, both physically and mentally.”

— Ray Kurzweil

72. “Increasing complexity” on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.”

— Ray Kurzweil

73. “One view is that philosophy is a kind of halfway house for questions that have not yet yielded to the scientific method.”

— Ray Kurzweil

74. “The brain is a three-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light years across. – Marian Diamond.”

— Ray Kurzweil

75. “In order for a digital neocortex to learn a new skill, it will still require many iterations of education, just as a biological neocortex does, but once a single digital neocortex somewhere and at some time learns something, it can share that knowledge with every other digital neocortex without delay. We can each have our own private neocortex extenders in the cloud, just as we have our own private stores of personal data today.”

— Ray Kurzweil

76. “However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing – deepening – the.”

— Ray Kurzweil

77. “Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view.”

— Ray Kurzweil

78. “Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be “achieved through science and technology steered by human values.”

— Ray Kurzweil

79. “To this day, I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandaries we face – business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time – there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.”

— Ray Kurzweil

80. “We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly.”

— Ray Kurzweil

81. “When people have difficulty achieving regular releases of dopamine through these kinds of socially accepted activities, they will often seek a shortcut.”

— Ray Kurzweil

82. “This, then, was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.”

— Ray Kurzweil

83. “A machine is as distinctively and brilliantly and expressively human as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid. – GREGORY VLASTOS.”

— Ray Kurzweil

84. “Our first invention was the story.”

— Ray Kurzweil

85. “I am also reminded of Watson’s remark to Sherlock Holmes, “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all.”164.”

— Ray Kurzweil

86. “This effect occurs relatively quickly, unlike the requirement to build up levels in the bloodstream that accompanies some prescription drugs for depression. It is, therefore, an effective, natural, and quick-acting treatment for mild depression. Human trials have also shown benefits for strengthening the liver and for relief from osteoarthritis.”

— Ray Kurzweil

87. “Our everyday “commonsense” knowledge as a human being is even greater; “street smarts” actually require substantially more of our neocortex than “book smarts.” Including this brings our estimate to well over 100 million patterns, taking into account the redundancy factor of about 100.”

— Ray Kurzweil

88. “Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small.”

— Ray Kurzweil

89. “By failing to engage it in intellectually challenging activities, your brain will fail to grow new connections, and it will indeed become disorganized and ultimately dysfunctional. The converse is also true for both body and brain. If someone who has not been physically active for a sustained period starts a program of physical therapy and regular exercise, she can regain her muscle mass and tone within a matter of months. The same thing is true of your brain.”

— Ray Kurzweil

90. “If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.”

— Ray Kurzweil

91. “Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it – life begins in slime and ends in intelligence – whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: “We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods.” – HUSTON SMITH16 Some philosophers hold.”

— Ray Kurzweil

92. “Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to “get it right the first time,” and that its initial design must have “zero nonrecoverable errors.”45.”

— Ray Kurzweil

93. “Our brains are subject to either sudden or gradual decline with age, to self-destructive addictive behaviors, to depression and anxiety disorders, and to many other limitations, not to mention potentially catastrophic lapses of judgment.”

— Ray Kurzweil

94. “Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. – CARL SAGAN.”

— Ray Kurzweil

95. “Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose.”

— Ray Kurzweil

96. “Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?”

— Ray Kurzweil

97. “The Singularity involves an event that will take place in the material world, the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process that started with biological evolution and has extended through human-directed technological evolution.”

— Ray Kurzweil

98. “It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche.”

— Ray Kurzweil

99. “The statistical methods underlying productivity measurements tend to factor out gains by essentially concluding that we still get only one dollar of products and services for a dollar, despite the fact that we get much more for that dollar.”

— Ray Kurzweil

100. “Hoewel we de illusie hebben dat we beelden met hoge resolutie ontvangen van onze ogen, stuurt de oogzenuw slechts contouren en aanwijzingen over interessante punten in ons blikveld naar het brein. We ‘hallucineren’ eigenlijk de wereld vanuit ons corticale geheugen.”

— Ray Kurzweil